


Höllenschlampe

by somegunemojis



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: A man's Best Friend!, sometimes you are simply a creature, unfortunately also contains animal death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:48:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23516455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somegunemojis/pseuds/somegunemojis
Summary: Two creatures of war, fleet of foot and hard of heart.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Höllenschlampe

**Author's Note:**

> 2 things:  
> 1\. hate the name Gilbert Bielschmidt and no I do not take criticism.  
> 2\. Rainer Gersten, motherfucker extraordinaire

1177, DANZIG.

They raze a village to the ground in late November. Rainer is on throat cutting duty, snuffing out the lives of the enemies still suffering at the end of the battle. The ash from the burning houses falls right along with the snow, and as the screams and cries and whimpers are snuffed out one by one, the world grows quiet from the muffling blanket of snow as even the sound of crackling flames is dampened.

A shrill, frightened whinny cuts through the night, and jeering, and after he closes the last of the heathen’s eyes (a girl, his age, who had been grim and silent despite the gaping, seeping hole torn in her side), he makes his way to the source of the noise. Elbows his way through the crowd just in time to watch a man sail into a fence, and scramble over it, wheezing. There’s no need to follow his trajectory, because a filly crashes into the fence not long after, coal black and streaked with soot, eyes rolling white in her head. The gathered men laugh at the spectacle and then disperse, unwilling to fuss with such a crazed thing when there is armor to clean and dinner to be had. Rainer draws closer, and the filly stamps her feet and tosses her head at him, so he stops. There in the corner lays a mare, dead.

They stand and stare in silence for a moment, snow and ash and blood and sweat streaking their faces and shoulders, until the filly ceases to tremble. Rainer creeps forward once again, and undoes the latch on the gate for her. He turns his back before she’s brave enough to take a step, leaving the gate cracked, and fades into the lengthening shadows to go find somewhere to rest his weary head in the lengthening night.

The next morning, there is frost on his eyelashes when he wakes up, and a wash of hot hay-breath startles him awake. In the watery morning light, she seems smaller– her fur sticks to her in dried-sweat patches, bits of lather clinging to her. She is all black– mane, tail, muzzle, and. Well, the one eye black, the other a clouded blue. Her ears are trained on him, and when she sees he is awake, she stretches out her neck and puts her nose up against his skinny arm, huffs a breath, and then she bites him. Hard. She drags him kicking and squealing from his bedding and tosses him into the snow, strong despite her clear youth. He curses her and her mother and each and every one of her ancestors, and the cacophony they make bring adults to investigate, swords drawn. He throws his arms around her neck, and she drops her head, and everyone is completely still for a moment as the two youths eye the armed men, and the armed men eye them back. The bite on his arm sluggishly drips cold blood down the front of her face. “This is Höllenschlampe,” he finally says. The men look at each other and raise their eyebrows, and tell him they are not keeping an unbroken horse, that fillies aren’t worth the effort of training them, and then they leave him to his strange rituals.

It is mid-December the first time he can climb onto her back. She stands stock-still and bracey with her head down, blowing hard enough from her nose that the snow on the ground stirs. He feels like he can reach the stars on her back, and when he leans down to pat her neck, he whispers to her, and he tells her about the nations they will bring to their knees. She raises her head, and she boldly marches forward.

1216, THE LONG MARCH TO ZAGREB.

She has not died. It has been nearly forty years, and she has aged as he has– slowly. Her fine bones grew sturdy and long, and long summers in the sun have turned the ends of her mane and tail into shades of brown, and never once have her fleet feet and her shocking bravery failed him. The dusty roads dye them both, and occasionally she will toss her head restlessly at the slow pace of the marching army, so he will turn her off and let her run. They come up on villages, empty and occupied, and children weave up to him and ask if he has ever killed anyone (no, of course he hasn’t killed anyone, God says ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, and he is, above all, a Good Catholic) and adults give him strange looks, a feral-looking boy with a heavy sword and a warhorse.

She takes him to a stream, and they wade into it up to her belly, and he lets loose on the reins so she can drop her head and her drink her fill as he listens to the birds in the trees and the distant sounds of a marching army, and then there is a sudden, deep silence. She lifts her head and flicks her ears forward, and when he follows her gaze there is a grizzled old man on the bank in front of them, an empty basket in his arms and an odd smile on his face. None of them move. Rainer blinks and the old man is a stag, with great big antlers that seem to stretch around the whole clearing in patterns that don’t quite make sense, and when he blinks his eyes move like there are more than just two, though that is all Rainer can count before his eyes roll back in his head and he tumbles out of the saddle and into the river.

He comes to on the shore, soaked and sluggishly bleeding from the nose, Höllenschlampe standing over him-- there is nothing else around them save a patch of dead foliage where the incomprehensible deer-man-creature had been standing, and within the patch of dead foliage there is a black smudge and what seems like a thousand hoofprints. He doesn’t draw his eyes away until she shoves her nose into his chest to shake him out of his own head, and he strokes his shaking hand over her large cheek before swinging onto her back once more.

1460, OUTSIDE OF KÖNIGSBERG.

They fly fleet-footed into a town, carrying news of an impending battle. An old man approaches them, not wary at all of the dancing hooves and the tossing head, and he takes her reins and offers to put him up for the night. Höllenschlampe drops her head, and he takes a moment to feel her heaving breaths between his knees, the ache in his spine, the tension in his shoulders, and the pounding behind his left eye that worsens without the accompaniment of hoofbeats. He acquiesces, stumbling when he slides from the saddle for the first time in centuries, and the old man steadies him, and together they walk to his barn.

Höllenschlampe pins her ears back as soon as Rainer’s legs stop shaking, and the old man backs off with a huff of amused laughter while Rainer unsaddles her, rubs her down, feeds and waters her. She bites him on the ass and he hisses curses at her, scampering after the man and into his home. He introduces himself as Ludwig Weber, puts on a stew, and tells a lean and teenaged Rainer of his dead wife and his dead sons, lost to fever and to war. He tells him of the many battles he has seen, and how he feels about men going to war and dying over a duchy, a state, and Rainer sits silently with a bowl of soup in his lap that goes cold, he is so enraptured by the man’s quiet words, his stillness, his sadness.

He tells Rainer what he knows of horses, of the horses killed under him, and that the souls of horses are like the souls of men: they too must love war. Rainer thinks of Höllenschlampe sequestered in the man’s stable and the way she squeals and throws her weight on the battlefield, fierce and angry and charging forward always, a prey animal turned predator by one single stroke. The old man tells him that men like to believe they had created and formed horses to be this way, but he claims no creature can learn something their soul cannot already hold. He tells him that the soul of a horse is a terrible thing to see, and offers him a drink. Rainer thinks him possibly mad (though certainly correct) but he takes the drink, and they sit in silence and watch the fire slowly turn to ash.

It is late. Rainer, though he is older than the grizzled man can begin to imagine, asks him childish things. He asks if horses can be their friends, if there is a heaven for them, and what would happen if they were to disappear from the earth. The old man tells him horses do not understand their shallow forms of communication, that horses have no need of heaven, and that speaking of such things has no point, because God would never let them go. The man scoots closer to him and Rainer stands, and sets aside his mug with his heart suddenly pounding in his chest and throat and head, and he thanks him for his hospitality and he leaves.

He saddles his horse in the dark and she stands utterly still, one ear cocked to him and one toward the house he just left. He imagines she can hear the blood pounding in between his ears, the grinding of his teeth, and she can certainly feel his tension when he swings onto her back and urges her into motion. She goes forward into the night without hesitation, despite the long ride they’d had in the day, and the long ride that they face into the night.

1761, KOLBERG.

In battle she takes great, leaping strides. She is alert, and she uses her teeth and her sharp hooves and her body to give him every advantage. She moves like a frog, unpredictable and frenzied to all but him.

He takes off her saddle and he takes off his coat and his sword and he sets them to the side on the edge of a rye field. He washes her in the cold creek, and then he washes himself while she grazes lazily in the shade. The water runs clear, and fast enough that it only turns a little pink before it sweeps away, and he likes that. When he is finished he hops on her broad, damp back and he leans back and he watches the clouds drift lazily by while he tries to get his spinning head under control.

Rainer sits up slowly, awakening from a nap some time later, to a slowly darkening evening sky. He strokes Höllenschlampe’s shoulders and tangles the fingers of one hand into her mane. She meanders slowly into the rye field, and he holds his hand out and lets the tall stalks tickle his palm, and with the oppressive afternoon heat gone the birdsong rings louder than before. He will dream of this peace until the day he dies.

1917, GORLICE.

They have no use for cavalry chargers – not with the advent of tanks, and machine guns. Höllenschlampe survives seven bullets to the chest early on in the war, only to get drafted to pull artillery. She grows far too lean, and the harnesses give her sores, and Rainer cannot throw his weight around to keep her out of it because he does not have any weight to throw anymore. She lasts four gruelling years longer at the carts than most of the heavy horses, pinning her ears back and biting at her drivers, but throwing all of her strength into her task.

Rainer is curled on his side one blustery November night, watching the snow come down between the branches of the bare trees above him, when he hears the snow-muffled unsteady hoofbeats. He has not seen Höllenschlampe in months, but he can tell it’s her-- what’s a few months in the face of centuries?-- so he sits up and peers into the darkness.

He almost doesn’t recognize her, with how skinny she has become. Even in the darkness he can count every rib and knob in her spine, and he jumps to his feet and roots around in his bag for the last of his bread. Anything.

She will not take it, instead shoving him back to the ground with one powerful bump of her heavy head, and while he sits stupidly on his ass among his blankets she lays down on her side and rests her bony jaw against his bony thigh. It's comfortable for neither of them, but Rainer puts his forehead down on her neck and he strokes her and he lets his tears fall into her dark mane and he murmurs softly to her until her breathing slows, and with one last trembling sigh, it stops.


End file.
